Thiel Owners

dspr - Rob at Coherent Source Service could check your serial numbers for whether yours were upgraded to the "i" status. The difference was upgraded woofers and possibly an XO tweak to compensate.

I communicated with Rob and shared pics. He confirmed that my Thiel's are CS5i's.

Makes them that much harder to give them up.

Guess I will try moving them around again and start by placing them a bit closer together although I recall I tried that and did not like it.

Thanks for listening,

Dsper

Dspr - CS5s are a tough nut to crack. Their impedance drops to 2.5 ohms at 150Hz and keeps dropping to 1.5Hz by 20Hz, and lower at 10Hz. It devastates most amps. I don't remember for sure whether the 'improved' woofers raised that impedance a little. The CS5(i) did not prosper in the market because so few amps could drive it well. As you know, Jim used Krell, ending up with the FPB-600 which could drive a tank.

thielrules.  Thanks for sharing your experience removing the waveguides. 

And he used the Goertz flat wire, which has the lowest characteristic impedance, which is a requirement for very low impedance speaker loads.

I would imagine that the CS5i’s woofers without the added pads on the original CS5’s would help in that regard. I thought the “i” version was a nice improvement.